The U.S and the Arab Israeli Conflict

As inspired by Melani McAlister's Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. interests in the Middle East since 1945

Telling stories is the most important job anyone could have. Building social and political orders and managing overseas interests requires having a certain perception of plot, characters, roles and a system of signifying and assigning meaning. Within such stories, values are created and negative and positive attributes ascribed to certain behavioral patterns and identities. As part of these storylines a process of positioning occurs where specific ideas are placed over and above others. These narratives have the function of maintaining a system of social order through continuously preserving a shared meaning using particular signifiers which are pertinent to the public audience. A process of negotiating such meanings and symbols is always in sway.

The perceptions of Israel in the United States and, importantly, the history of how these perceptions came to be, are part of a bigger story about America and the emergence of different sub-plots in different locations in American politics and society, including America's role abroad (particularly in the Vietnam era), gender roles in American society (and the rise of the feminist movement) and issues of race (as manifest in the civil rights movement). What is interesting in Melani Mcalister's analysis of the role Israel played in the American narrative in the decades spanning the fifties through the eighties is how she reveals the converging sub-narratives at different points in time which worked to place Israel in a favorable position vis a vis US foreign policy in a sort of, to use Weberian terms, elective affinity. Such an elective affinity existed between the losses in Vietnam and Israel's victory in the Middle East. Mcalister writes that " Israel came to be constituted as an icon in the post-Vietnam debate about the nature of U.S. world power… As questions raged both about the morality of the U.S. war in Vietnam and about the role of the U.S. military more generally, Israel came to provide a political model for thinking about military power and a practical example of effectiveness in the use of that power ."Similarly the rise of the evangelical right to fill a spiritual vacuum in America amidst a " rising tide of interest in religious and inspirational writings". coincided with Israel's 1967 victory and seeming parallelism between the biblical prophecies and the wars in the Middle East. Moreover, Israel provided a masculine militaristic alternative to the feminism which "shook American culture to its core in the 1970s".

This challenges the proliferation of texts which give hegemonic influence to the Israel Lobby as the determinant of all US actions related to Israel. The picture appears to be more complicated than that. In fact what Mcalister does is reveal that such alliances of interests are- while often historically coincidental, -definitely not linked meaninglessly. In her landscape portrait the Israel lobby can be understood as a benefactor of the historical processes that preceded it or at least a part of the whole which is not itself separate and did not come to exist in its form out of sheer will. In fact the meaning of Israel for America has much more to do with America's perceived role and identity of itself in the larger storyline than is usually implied. And thus much of the alliance power we see today is a result of America's effort to define itself, and less because of conscious planning by anyone in the Israeli foreign ministry.

The narrative in which Israel as American friend, benefactor and moral exemplar fit so perfectly was one which came together as a result of forces attempting to counter the social turmoil that had made the sixties and seventies a time of instability. This was a time when America was searching for its soul- a system of symbols and values to once again create shared consensus over meaning which events like the Vietnam War and the women's and the civil rights movements had done much to shake up. It was a time when a new social order was in formation and thus meanings had to be renegotiated and new potent signifiers were drawn upon eagerly. Israel came at this point as the redeemer of American spiritual life (with the rise of premillennial dispensationalists), American masculinity ( as a militarized state countering the feminist movement ) and American power ( as a heroic warrior against terrorism and hostile, inferior races).

This brings up interesting questions about the relationship between philosophy and politics. This is because what such an analysis shows is that interests are not fixed static facts on an unchanging agenda where meaning is taken as a given constant. Agendas and interests require systems of meanings-in a sense, philosophies- in order to validate them, and thus allow them to exist at all. No sense of interest is possible without first a sense of identity, role and a general understanding of how the system as a whole works and what the economy of its values are. In discussing the rise of evangelical Christianity and its support of the state of Israel, Mcalister writes that " the gaps in linear, rational logic apparent in certain kings of cultural texts highlighted (of only implicitly) the failure of rationality in the face of a dramatically transformed world system- an economic, political and social universe that no longer seemed comprehensible by the old methods". Thus it is the most basic questions about the nature of the human being and her relationship to the universe that are implicitly at stake in such moments. Similarly, questions about masculinity and femininity, about the desirability of certain types of power, notions of race, and the nature of the world order came to shape the relationship of America to Israel.

In such negotiations there are winners and losers. Yet the process never comes to a close and the losing systems of meaning, although suppressed, rarely cease to exist. In fact the relationship between America and Israel today is still mitigated by the existence of certain values of liberalism and humanism, as well as notions of race and gender equality for example as present in the democracy discourse. It is thus the network of relationships as a whole both in its horizontal complexity and depth of layers which must be analyzed in order to be able to understand how Israel is framed in the (not monolithic) American consciousness. Further studies of different sorts of coalitions and organizational and institutional practices as well as corollary developments in seemingly unrelated areas should be scrutinized to explain how such framing translates into specific policy decisions. The final lesson to be learnt is that rarely can one process or one set of interests explain phenomena which are of concern to the historian or social scientist, especially if it would help international relations specialists of the Middle East to know more about the American feminist movement and American popular culture as influenced by films such as "Exodus." This is much more than saying that culture influences politics. This brings itself to bear on the necessity of being more than a specialist, boxed in disciplinary academic divisions, if the historian or political analyst is to have a well-rounded understanding of what shapes policies and constructs histories